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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Mozilla

Mozilla Research Party

April 2nd @ Mozilla

Brendan Eich, Co-Founder & CTO of Mozilla

I crashed Mozilla's Research Party because I was excited to expand the foundations of the Open Web, but more importantly their office overlooks the Bay Bridge and I was even more excited to find that out. Brandan Eich co-founded Mozilla.org and is currently the CTO. Brendan is widely known for his contributions to the evolution of the Web, including inventing JavaScript and spearheading its ongoing standardization and evolution (not a big deal). Brendan kicked-off the event with a keynote speech as it was streamed live on Air Mozilla.

Mozilla is 15 years old and it builds software very differently than any other company because they're not really a company, but in fact an open-source project backed by a not-for-profit foundation for the public benefit to promote choice and innovation on the internet. Brendan is the ultimate decision maker for any technical issues and sees the goal of Mozilla engineering as "expanding up the stack to fight proprietary lock-in that diminishes developer and user experience", to not just work on excellent products but make them successful by partnering up with other organizations.

Back in 2004, Mozilla ran a Technical Advisory Board or TAB which mostly took advice from Enterprise companies, which they proceeded to mostly ignore. The last TAB meeting though was the biggest, and the one where Sergey Brin showed up representing Google. Due to a back injury, Sergey stood a lot. This tended to intimidate some of the other TAB members, who were pretty clearly wondering "What's going on? Should I stand too?" An accidental executive power move that I now will employ. Mozilla has come a long way, and today Mozilla Research is laser-focused on the Web with lots of research projects and industrial partners in the future.